Funny, I find google useless for programming queries lately.
Although, if you go past the beginner questions, all searches become useless. You want something exotic and android specific? Good luck wading through 3000 pages explaining you how to use Android. Even though you specified 'programmatically' or 'in code'. And 90% of the rest are SEO "tutorial" pages that don't answer your question either.
I recently had the misfortune of trying to learn Android app development and oh my GOD I can't describe how SEO-ridden it is. Basically any search that Google can surmise as being related to Android development (no matter if I'm searching for the fix for some error message, etc), I get almost a full page of results that are SEO'd "Android App Dev Tutorial For Beginners" that are all basically:
- 25 minute read of "how to install Android Studio"
- "Okay now that you have that, you can go off and start writing Android apps! Have fun!
Now there is no mass of people verifying the quality of random sites, and search engines lost they anchor.
Have you ever seen any study like that for reddit and twitter? Those have completely different characteristics. (SO looks similar enough, but it's not comprehensive.)
On how did Google kill blogs, looks like you haven't noticed they decided to concentrate their search results on a small number of sites a few years ago.Google just does not lead people to them anymore.
Raph now works for Google AFAIA.
Yes, it's better than nothing, but don't expect it to keep the same quality of results we got earlier. Google killed the golden goose when they decided do concentrate their results on the large sites only, and it will be very hard to make similar algorithms work that well again.
Levien's reputation graph needn't be slavishly followed, though it does suggest an alternative.
It would be nice if some decent entrepreneurial academics could create a web browser that was better than the SEOers and would aim to do no evil. Sigh. One can dream.